I REFER to two recent letters concerning profits made by companies, indicating that to make a profit was somehow immoral.

What utter nonsense. Companies exist to make a profit by providing goods or services that people want, at a price they can afford.

This is what drives innovation, research and development as companies strive to compete with each other to gain a larger share of the market, and produce their goods or services.

We in the West have in place better health and safety rules than any companies in noncapitalist or socialist countries, and as accidents cost companies money, they make every effort to avoid them. One of your correspondents mentions the oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, suggesting it was the result of risk taking in the search for greater profit. Again, this is nonsense. Accidents do occasionally happen, and cannot always be foreseen.

As for tougher sentences, the cost to BP of this accident is enormous, and something it would have avoided if it had a crystal ball.

I think he will find that the accident rate in British companies is far lower than in Russia or China, for example, indeed any country that is a socialist dictatorship, and our health and safety regulations are the strictest in the world.

Iain Camick states that making and selling cars is a business for profit and provides no service to the public. Not so. It is providing a service that people want, otherwise such companies would not exist.

One of your correspondents holds up Cuba as an example to us. Well, may I remind that person that Cuba is a ruthless military dictatorship. The people there do not have the freedom we possess, with our civil rights enshrined in law.

They cannot express their views as you or I can do, and live in comparative poverty compared to the countries of western Europe. Anyone criticising their government is ruthlessly suppressed.

If it was such a desirable place to live, why do you think hundreds of Cubans risk their lives every year (many of them losing their lives) in an attempt to escape to America, in flimsy boats, from that ruthless regime? I do not see any who have successfully reached America queueing up to return.

And why do the countries of Eastern Europe, formally controlled by the Soviet Union, are queueing up to join the EU?

It is because they see greater freedom and prosperity here. It is for these same reasons that people from all over the world are coming to live here in droves.

Why try to change a system that is the envy of the world?

David James Bolton